Overview

Nanobox is a portable, micro platform for developing and deploying apps. When working locally, Nanobox uses Docker to spin up and configure a virtual development environment configured to your specific needs. When you’re ready to deploy to live servers, Nanobox will take that same environment and spin it up on your cloud provider of choice, where you can then manage and scale your app through the Nanobox dashboard.

Include the Phalcon extension. Nanobox takes a bare-bones approach to extensions, so you’ll likely need to include other extensions. More information can be found here.

Add a bash alias for Phalcon Devtools so you can just use the phalcon command.

Add Phalcon Devtools to your composer.json

Create a composer.json file in the root of your project and add the phalcon/devtools package to your dev requirements:

{"require-dev":{"phalcon/devtools":"~3.0.3"}}

NOTE: The version of Phalcon Devtools depends on which PHP version you’re using

Start Nanobox and Generate a New Phalcon App

From the root of your project, run the following commands to start Nanobox and generate a new Phalcon app. As Nanobox starts, the PHP engine will automatically install and enable the Phalcon extension, run a composer install which will install Phalcon Devtools, then drop you into an interactive console inside the virtual environment. Your working directory is mounted into the /app directory in the VM, so as changes are made, they will be reflected both in the VM and in your local working directory.

Run the App Locally

Before actually running your new Phalcon app, we recommend using Nanobox to add a DNS alias. This will add an entry to your local hosts file pointing to your dev environment and provide a convenient way to access your app from a browser.

nanobox dns add local phalcon.dev

Nanobox provides a php-server helper script that starts both Apache (or Nginx depending on your boxfile.yml config) and PHP. When passed with the nanobox run command, it will start the local dev environment and immediately run your app.

Check Out the Environment

# drop into a Nanobox console
nanobox run
# check the php version
php -v# check that phalcon devtools are available
phalcon info
# check that your local codebase is mountedls# exit the consoleexit

Phalcon and Nanobox

Nanobox gives you everything you need develop and run your Phalcon app in an isolated virtual environment. With the boxfile.yml in your project, collaborators can get up and running in minutes simply by running nanobox run.

Nanobox has a Phalcon Quickstart that includes everything covered in this post. They also have as guides for using Phalcon with Nanobox. In future posts, we’d like to cover other aspects of using Phalcon with Nanobox, including adding and connecting to a database, deploying Phalcon into production, etc. If you’re interested let us know on Twitter.